Brian Allain

From “Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation” by Parker J. Palmer After a few months of deepening frustrations, I took my troubles to an older Quaker woman well known for her thoughtfulness and candor, “Ruth,” I said, “people keep telling me that ‘way will open.’ Well, I sit in the silence, […]

From “What Makes You Come Alive: A Spiritual Walk with Howard Thurman” by Lerita Coleman Brown I have not yet read about a nature-based custom common among the enslaved Gullah people, African Americans who lived along the coast of and on the islands near South Carolina. Gullah youth would go out into nature to find

From “Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life” by Henri Nouwen with Michael J. Christensen and Rebecca J. Laird God speaks to us all the time and in many ways, but it requires spiritual discernment to hear God’s voice, see what God see, and read the signs in daily life.                      -Henri Nouwen

From “The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything” by Stephen M. R. Covey Redundancy is unnecessary duplication. Of course, redundant mission-critical systems and data management are necessary. But a redundancy tax is paid in excessive organizational hierarchy, layers of management, and overlapping structures all designed to ensure control. For the most part,

From “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success” by Carol S. Dweck, PhD Mindsets are an important part of your personality, but you can change them. Just by knowing about the two mindsets, you can start thinking and reacting in new ways. People tell me they start to catch themselves when they are in the throes

From “Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation” by Steven Johnson In the late nineties, a Stanford Business School professor named Martin Ruef decided to investigate the relationship between business innovation and diversity. Ruef was interested in the coffeehouse model of diversity, not the “melting pot” political kind: the diversity of professions

From “Embracing Your Second Calling: Find Passion and Purpose for the Rest of Your Life” by Dale Hanson Bourke “We arrive in this world with birthright gifts – then we spend the first half of our lives abandoning them or letting others disabuse us of them,” Parker Palmer says in Let Your Life Speak. “We

From “Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner” by Frederick Buechner WHAT I BEGAN TO see was that the Bible is not essentially, as I had always more or less supposed, a book of ethical principles, of moral exhortations, of cautionary tales about exemplary people, of uplifting thoughts – in fact, not really

From “Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most” by Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, and Ryan McAnnally-Linz Now do the same thing for your orienting emotions (how you feel not just right now, but from day to day in the regular course of your life).

From “The Language of the Soul: Meeting God in the Longings of Our Hearts” by Jeff Crosby   A lovely reframing of examen comes from Marilyn McEntyre, a writer whose varied works of poetry, art, list making, and spirituality I have long admired and benefited from. In her book Where the Eye Alights, she offers the